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I don't often write or speak about “values,” because value and values both are abstractions arrived at subjectively and, these days, bandied about by far-right religionists as if they had coined those words. But I've been thinking about values lately, as the United States enters this ordeal some call "opening up." Remember the adage, “Crisis doesn't build character; it reveals it”? Values are in effect the character of a society, and ours is definitely being revealed.
Trump and his followers claim that the “real folks”—white, working-class males—are eager to get back to work, and it's only elite liberal intellectuals on the coasts who want to go slow until it’s safer, with better precautions in place. (I know, hilarious: Trump posing the situation as a class struggle.) The truth is that 74 percent of the U.S. population is very leery of these precipitous openings, and has made it clear that they/we...